"Yes sir," resumed Miss Hassiebrock, her voice twanging in her effort at suppression, "I notice you're pretty willing to borrow some of my loud dressing when you get a bid once in a blue moon to take a boat-ride up to Alton with that sad-faced Roy Brownell. If Charley didn't have a cent to his name and a harelip, he'd make Roy Brownell look like thirty cents."
"If Roy Brownell was Charley Cox, I'd hate to leave him laying around loose where you could get your hands on him."
"Genevieve, you run out and play."
"If—if you keep running around till all hours of the night, with me and ma waiting up for you, kicking up rows and getting your name insinuated in the newspapers as 'the tall, handsome blonde,' I—I'm going to throw up my job, I am, and you can pay double your share for the running of this flat. Next thing we know, with that crowd that don't mean any good to you, this family is going to find itself with a girl in trouble on its hands."
"You—"
"And if you want to know it, and if I wasn't somebody's confidential stenographer, I could tell you that you're on the wrong scent. Boys like Charley Cox don't mean good by your kind of a girl. If you're not speedy, you look it, and that's almost the same as inviting those kind of boys to—"
Miss Lola Hassiebrock sprang up then, her hand coming down in a small crash to the table.
"You cut out that talk in front of that child!"
Thus drawn into the picture, Genevieve, at thirteen, crinkled her face for not uncalculating tears.
"In this house it's fuss and fuss and fuss. Other children can go to the 'movies' after supper, only me-e-e—"